Quotes About Insight

It was in the defects that they [servants] invariably acquired that I learned of my own natural, invariable defects, and their character presented me with a sort of negative proof of my own.

sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving...

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow.

The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things, and in this case the absence of any description of my external surroundings is tantamount to a description of my internal state.

What is strength without a double share of wisdom?

Those who have put out the people's eyes, reproach them of their blindness.

few sometimes may know, when thousands err

Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant.

And how after we grow old can we read the Bible without a little helpful science? Just think, father, you cannot read your Bible without spectacles,... And spectacles cannot be made without some knowledge of the science of optics.

Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen.

We judge things by their present appearances, but the Lord sees them in their consequences.

Truth is paradox.

The soul is always wiser than the mind, even though we are dependent on the mind to read the soul for us.

We all have experiences, but as T. S. Eliot said, we had the experience but missed the meaning. Every human heart seeks meaning; for it is in meaning that our deepest shelter lies.

It was Kierkegaard who said that life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.

One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that everyone is ripping off second hand thinking. We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it, that can calm and bring us home, and also challenge us.

Television and the computer world are great empty shadow-lands. To look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision.

One of the questions that John loved to pose was "when was your last great conversation with someone?" Good conversation chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade, and it penetrates the depths so as to soar unto unfolding possibility.

they don't know that the outside could be the inside if only they would stop all this pushing and shoving and screaming, and they haven't got enough sense to realize that.

In the divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim.

My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant total amazement.

If you close your eyes, you will be a party to all that comes after.

There is a great deal more to ignorance than the lack of management methods or scientific research. The evils of ignorance come first from not understanding where you are or what that means. French

It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverers.